Profit, Not Principles

In “The Frailties of Reason” (July/August), Paul J. Griffiths alludes to “our American record of slaughtering those whose preferred political order is nondemocratic.” Insofar as this suggests that America cares a fig about democracy, it is misleading. The United States has overthrown many democratic leaders—Mosaddegh, Árbenz, Lumumba, Sukarno, Allende, with extensive slaughter usually following—and enjoyed long, cordial relationships with many murderous dictators—Batista, Somoza, Trujillo, Marcos, Mobutu, the Shah, Suharto, Pinochet, the Argentine junta, the Brazilian generals, the Guatemalan colonels. In every case what determined U.S. hostility or friendship was the degree of subservience offered by the regime to U.S. business. The guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy is not a high-minded preference for democracy but a ruthless dedication to corporate profits.

George Scialabba
Cambridge, Mass.

Speaking Out for Gaza

Seldom has an article resounded with me as deeply as Julie Schumacher Cohen’s treatment of the Gaza war and the difficulties, for Catholics especially, of dealing with the terrible destruction and injustices of the Israel-Palestine conflict (“Catholic Guilt and Gaza,” July/August). As a member of the generation that experienced the dramatic change in (Catholic) culture from “the Jews killed Christ” to Nostra aetate and the Second Vatican Council, I’ve been horrified by the carnage the Israel Defense Forces has rained down upon the people—women, children, and non-Hamas—and infrastructure of Gaza, but felt inhibited to speak out lest my abhorrence toward the government of Israel and its war crimes be interpreted as antisemitism or as a repudiation of Nostra aetate and condemnation of God’s chosen people and their role in salvation history. I am a very well-read Catholic and I don’t believe I’d ever heard of the Nakba before. The Holocaust is rightly remembered in memorials, museums, stories, and stamps; it serves as the unspoken but always present justification for Israeli actions against any who may threaten it. But, not one in a thousand would recognise the Nakba and the part it must play in the psyche of a people whose land was taken from them so that Israel could exist.

Cohen suggests a confessional approach for Catholics to address the injustice. Bravo! But I will raise a particularly Catholic problem, at least as experienced by this Catholic. I attempt to keep myself grounded in God’s reality by praying (with the Church) the Morning and Evening Prayers from the Liturgy of the Hours. The Psalms are beautiful prayer-poems that address all the ways we relate to God and he relates to us. But, in praying them now, after I’ve just seen or read about children starving to death or men being killed when trying to get food for their families, I am infuriated and distracted because the words seem to justify the cruelty and destruction the current Israeli government visits upon its “enemies.” Maybe I should stick to the rosary until there’s a ceasefire in Gaza.

Hubert Gordon
Palmyra, Pa.

What Can the Church Do?

Julie Schumacher Cohen’s essay on Catholics and Gaza presents a compelling personal dimension and rightly calls us to recognize the need to both resist antisemitism and pursue justice for Palestinians. She raises our awareness. I am less clear as to what she expects us, and in particular the institutional Church, to do.

These thoughts occur. Broadly, act counterculturally and in conjunction with other well-disposed Christian denominations and elements of the Jewish community. That is, acknowledge responsibility for Christian abuse of Jews and Judaism, but also overcome the inhibitions that keep us from necessary forthright criticism of Israeli and complicit American policies and behavior. It has been too easy to cite the complexities, express concern about the effects on “interfaith dialogue,” or otherwise rationalize avoidance. Call out real antisemitism, but also call such charges bogus when they are. That was largely the case when Republican members of Congress pilloried several presidents of prominent universities. The same is true of many accusations of antisemitism made to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

The Church needs to uphold international law and those institutions, such as the International Criminal Court and United Nations aid agencies, which are expressions of that law and act as counterweights against governments and other entities that put their interests ahead of the international order.

One specific thing the institutional Church might usefully do: firmly and publicly reject the proposition, enthusiastically endorsed in some Evangelical circles, that Scripture calls on Christians to uncritically support the modern nation-state of Israel. I thought it would be a cold day when I agreed with Tucker Carlson about anything, but I found myself cheering him on when he challenged Senator Ted Cruz on this point. Senator Cruz and Ambassador Mike Huckabee are prominent among those “Christian Zionists” who insist on this distortion of the Biblical message. They are enablers of the worst instincts of the Israeli right. Other Christians need to call out such mischief-making for what it is.

Ed McCarthy
Alexandria, Va.

Gaza & the Gospel

I am a Presbyterian pastor who, as of a few years ago, subscribed to Christianity Today, The Christian Century, Commonweal, and several other faith-based magazines. I was dismayed last year by the coverage in Christianity Today and The Christian Century of the unfolding catastrophe/genocide in Gaza, and cancelled my subscriptions to those magazines in disgust. Although I haven’t agreed with everything Commonweal has published on the subject, for the most part, Commonweal has been a refreshing contrast. The articles in the July/August issue—“Black Hole above Gaza” by Elina Kumra and Julie Schumacher Cohen’s piece—are examples of that. Nor are they the only ones. Thank you for this important witness to the integrity of the Gospel.

Craig Hunter
Denton, Tex.

Missing Depths

Anthony Annett did a commendable job historically framing the threats and opportunities that challenged the Church to be prophetic at the turn of the nineteenth century (“A Sequel to Rerum Novarum?,” July/August). However, the article falters in its treatment of AI. The analysis feels underdeveloped and lacks the depth that comes from real engagement—interacting with, conversing with, even befriending and critically wrestling with AI as it actually functions in lived experience.

Moreover, the binary it constructs between dystopian and utopian futures is unhelpful. It flattens a far more complex and unfolding reality. This kind of framing risks moral laziness, obscuring the nuanced, daily choices—individual, communal, and institutional—that shape how AI is integrated into our lives. We need a more theologically imaginative and philosophically robust approach—one that neither panics nor romanticizes, but discerns.

Thomas M. Howard
Chicago, Ill.